


the indescribable aftertaste of nuclear fallout

by weatheredlaw



Series: everything in threes [1]
Category: Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Death, F/M, M/M, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M, slightly nonsensical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-12
Updated: 2012-08-12
Packaged: 2017-11-11 23:32:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatheredlaw/pseuds/weatheredlaw
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Metal, iron, titanium. Fire, core, ore. Bomb, shell, detonator. Tony, Bruce, Jim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the indescribable aftertaste of nuclear fallout

**Author's Note:**

> Not much beyond shameless excuse to write angst and threesomes and Rhodey.

_your hands on my face your shoulder in my mouth_

 

 _Together_ is the first word, _together_ is the last. Pepper lands in the middle of the wreckage and lifts her faceplate and it's a shitty first day in her own suit. _Some rescue_ , she thinks, and begins hauling metal and debris away from the point of contact. If Tony were here, he'd do the heavy lifting for her, and she'd be back at home, doing the work she's supposed to be doing. 

Instead, she's out here, knee deep in more problems than she knows how to handle, in a suit Tony never should have built, waiting for Rhodey.

"Sun's comin' up," he says, instead of hello. Pepper drops her faceplate and looks at the sky.

"Yeah. Guess so."

 

 

Three days before. Not enough time to remember. Not enough to forget. Pepper drops a kiss onto Tony's forehead and hands him a cup of coffee. "You shouldn't have," he murmurs. 

"Neither should you."

"It's to _protect_ you. Because I...I can't always be here. And I hate it. And I'm sorry. But I want you to have more than your brains, when someone comes after you. And they will." He sets his cup on the table. No coaster. Pepper bites her cheek. "You're important. And I love you." 

She straddles his lap and he takes her on the couch, her skirt shoved to her hips and underwear pushed aside while she rides his cock, comes spectacularly against his nimble fingers. _And I love you, I love you, I love you_ , he doesn't say again. 

"Tony, Tony, Tony." A kiss, a kiss, a kiss. "What will I do with you?"

"Keep me, if I'm lucky."

But that's the thing. Tony and Pepper -- they aren't all that lucky.

 

 

His name is Bruce Banner, and Pepper has met him once before. Tony's man crush. A brain bigger than he knows what to do with, dry wide palms that wrap unsteadily around Pepper's hand. "Tony's a friend. I'd like to help."

"We'd like both of you to help," Rhodey says, recrossing his legs. Banner raises an eyebrow. 

"Seems fair."

"There was a satellite that crashed ten miles from this base. The debris is big, we're having trouble removing it."

Bruce glances over the paperwork. "Why are you--"

"It's Stark Tech. No one knew about it but us. No one removes it but us." Bruce nods. "Tony trusted you. He'd want you to help."

"Whatever...whatever we can do." Bruce closes the folder and pushes it across the table. "We're here to serve."

Later, with the Hulk in full bloom, the heavy metal sheets and piles of hot rock seem to disappear faster, and when Pepper leaves the suit behind in the cargo hold of the plane, she leaves behind a clean crash site. Like they weren't even there. Banner is passed out in one of the cabins, glasses askew on his face, clothes crooked from the stumbling redress he did not an hour before. Rhodey makes her a drink.

"Good job today."

"Let's not do this again."

"Wherever the roads may lead."

"I like making my own," she says quietly, downing the scotch. Later, she'll wake up from a nap and her mouth will taste like Tony's tongue, heavy and clever against her teeth, keening against the roof of her mouth.

 

 

The tower seems a little worse for wear, but it's hardly been five days. Pepper gives the couch a wide berth, goes to her room and sleeps for forty-eight hours. She wakes to sound of plates knocking together in the kitchen and she's terrified because this is her life now, this is what she waits for -- harrowing men in small spaces, men Tony said he'd kill for her.

"Breakfast," Bruce says.

"It's the middle of the night."

"Here," Rhodey counters, handing her a plate of food.

They eat too many eggs and too much bacon and too many pancakes, falling asleep again in a stone-cold pile in Pepper's bed. She wakes up with Bruce's hand curled around her ankle and Rhodey's mouth on the top of her head and it's never going to be enough, but Pepper wakes up in the shuddering light of dawn and decides that it's going to have to be. She gets up to shower and when she comes back, Jim and Bruce are curled like matching parenthesis in the middle of the bed. Pepper wraps her towel tighter and nests between them, only moving again when Bruce's hand falls onto her head to stroke wet bangs away from her eyes and Rhodey's lips are on her neck. 

She watches Jim come first, Bruce's mouth sliding over his cock, her own ghosting over his ribs, tongue dragging on scars and bones. Bruce comes last, after Pepper has fucked herself on Rhodey's fingers. Bruce's eyes are half closed and he makes a noise like an unworldly relief, orgasm rippling through him like someone's lifted a building off his chest. They are twisted together, connected at all the corners of their bodies like circuitry, magnets pulling in iron shavings.

"You did everything you could," Rhodey murmurs. "It wasn't your job."

"It should have been." _Maybe if it had been, he'd be here._

 

 

The official report is that Tony Stark drank himself to death. The world will swallow that pill. 

The truth is Tony fell. He fell so very far that no one was quick enough to catch him. He fell in all the ways a man can fall. And maybe if it had been Pepper's job to be there, to be with him even when she didn't need to be -- maybe she'd be listening to bad ACDC radio edits and ordering sushi and beer and they'd been kissing like kids in the lab like they always did. And maybe Pepper would really be in love, maybe she wouldn't be as lonely because they’d been working on it. Every day.

Tony never asked her to say it back. And she won't regret it now because that isn't what Potts do. 

But later, she will say it into the shirt that still smells like him. Just once. So it doesn't lose its meaning.

_I loved you I loved you I loved you._

Forever in threes.

Together.

 

 

_i will be back in three weeks._  
yours his ours,  
b. 

 

 

"Wanna fly?" Jim asks, stretched out in her bed like a model, smelling like sleep and Dial. 

"Now?"

"Yeah." He sits up and brushes the hair from her face, pulls her work out of her hands. "Now."

Their suits bump shoulders in the Mojave desert, and Pepper thinks about the sound of hammer on metal, of sparks and glass. She thinks about metal, iron, titanium. Fire, core, ore. Bomb, shell, detonator. Tony, Bruce, Jim.

Everything. _You and me and them._

Everything in threes. 

 

 

_do you know this house is fallin' apart?_


End file.
